Even in San Francisco, where advocacy of one form or another is a righteous passion, turnout for elections that don’t have presidential races or national midterms can be tepid, often well below the 50 percent mark.
The local vote to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom last September (68 percent turnout) was one exception. So far this year, a smaller subset of San Franciscans have shown civic enthusiasm, and that was again the case for yesterday’s election slate that was topped by the recall of SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Profiled in practically all the top national publications, Boudin was soundly recalled after two and a half years in office. Mayor London Breed will appoint an interim replacement once results are certified, and we’re going to be voting again in November, when a permanent DA will be chosen. (Boudin hasn’t said whether he will run again.)
“I want to be very clear about what happened tonight,” Boudin told his campaign supporters, blaming outsiders while acknowledging mistakes. “The right-wing billionaires outspent us three to one. They exploited an environment in which people are appropriately upset, and they created an electoral dynamic where we literally shadow boxing. Voters were not asked to choose between criminal justice reform and something else; they were given an opportunity to voice their frustration and their outrage, and they took that opportunity.”
As The Frisc and other outlets have reported, crime stats and data may show one thing while public sentiment tracks in a different direction.
The contentious Boudin recall follows hard on the heels of the landslide recall of three SF school board members in February. If SF voters are finding recalls to be a distraction or, as some opponents have oddly claimed, undemocratic, they had a chance to make them less appealing in yesterday’s vote with Proposition C, which would have given elected officials more time in office before a recall could be mounted, and would have prevented temporary replacements from running for the permanent seat. It lost with a sizable 60 percent “no” vote.
Whether the process is fundamentally flawed or not, recalls are one safety valve for holding our elected officials accountable, and making them harder didn’t seem appealing to SF voters — or at least to those who were energized to vote for a recall. Perhaps that’s no surprise.
Perhaps it was also no surprise that two other measures calling for greater civic accountability passed with nearly two-thirds approval. Proposition E and Proposition F addressed recent allegations and outbreaks of corruption at City Hall.
Prop E will prevent members of the Board of Supervisors from seeking donations from contractors for their favored agencies and nonprofits, more fallout from the Mohammed Nuru scandal. Prop F shakes up how the city sets rates and regulations for trash collection. (Both were authored by Sup. Aaron Peskin, who didn’t fare as well with Prop C.)
While a majority of voters favored Proposition A, a $400 million bond for Muni repairs, street upgrades, and more, at last count it was coming in shy of the two-thirds threshold required. The city’s Municipal Transportation Authority, crushed by COVID, has been buoyed by federal rescue funds, but they won’t last forever. If Prop A goes down to defeat, the transit agency will have to scramble to plug those infrastructure holes or leave them for a later date.
As The Frisc reported in March, SFMTA’s track record of delays and overruns with high-profile projects like Central Subway, along with its failure to spend the previous infrastructure bond in a timely manner, cast a shadow on the new bond proposition.
Despite the white-hot takes inspired by the Boudin result stacked atop the school board recall, the city has not swerved into tight-fisted conservatism. Muni might still get its money with enough late-arriving ballots. And bucking the recommendation of business-minded groups like the Chamber of Commerce and SPUR, voters handily passed Prop G, a requirement that businesses with more than 100 employees provide paid emergency health leave — COVID being the most pressing need — of up to 80 hours a year. (SPUR argued that a blanket law wasn’t necessary, because the supervisors could pass emergency legislation when appropriate.)
The Frisc plays by nonprofit rules, leaving endorsements to others and voting to the voters. What we do is offer perspective, and it’s this: The voters, at least when they care to turn out, are eager to express that they’re upset about the state of the city. Now that certain members of the Board of Education have been replaced and a new DA will be in charge, they’re going to have a harder time, rightly or wrongly, finding someone to kick around.
Our local November ballot will have those DA and school board replacements running for office, plus five supervisors up for reelection with their records under scrutiny.
We’ll still have a housing crisis, a dwindling public school system, and a public health crisis of homelessness and tragic overdoses. We’ll still get outraged by stories and viral videos of shoplifting, break-ins, smash-and-grabs, and brazen burglaries of small businesses.
There will also be police misconduct and judicial inequity, two systemic problems that Boudin vowed to address. Will his replacement seek reforms, which SF so squarely got behind in the summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? The fall campaigns will be an important measure of how much SF sticks to those values. We’ll soon see if candidates emerge who ask voters, as Boudin put it last night, to “choose between criminal justice reform and something else.”
Voicing discontent is an key part of civic engagement. Helping build solutions that make a city better is an even more important part, and it’s a lot harder.